August 10, 2017

It’s been two year since I last used a Bullet Journal. Originally I only used it out of necessity. I had lost my iPhone and had to two months without a smart phone while I waited for the new iPhone to be announced and shipped. It was a long two months, let me tell you, but Bullet Journaling help me through it.

Lately I’ve had the thought that maybe I’ve been forcing myself to be digital first when my mind doesn’t work that way. I can’t say this for fact, but how am I supposed to figure it out if I don’t see what the alternative to what I’ve been doing is? My last attempt at this ended because when I got my new and shiny iPhone, I couldn’t figure out where it needed to go or how to marry my digital and analog life successfully. In the end, I opted to go fully digital, because I attributed the friction as being caused by the journal, and not the phone.

But maybe I was wrong, maybe the friction was in trying to force the phone to take too much from the journal, which had been working perfectly up until then, and instead I should relegate the phone to a supportive role. This is made easier by the existence of a Bullet Journal Companion App. The key feature of which, for me, is the temporary Rapid Logging feature. Let’s be real, there are many times when carrying the journal around is impractical, but your phone is almost always around. The point isn’t to serve as a substitute for the Bullet Journal, but more as a notepad. And to ensure that you aren’t tempted to use it as a permanent journal, any rapid logging done in app disappears after 48 hours. So in this way, it serves as a notepad to log thing while you aren’t near your journal for transfer into it later.

But beyond the app, and a new term (“Stacks”) not much has changed in either the Bullet Journaling system or the community. You still only need a pen and a notebook to get started. I chose some Uni-ball 307’s and a Moleskine. If you want to go barebones basic, the basic structure hasn’t expanded beyond the 5 original modules, with the fifth, collections, being the wild card that could expand into infinite possibilities.

Hopefully I can stick with it this time. I truly believe it has a place in my life if I am correct about my mind working better with the analog. For now I’m sticking with the basic setup, and maybe expand into some permanent collections in the future. But for now, it’s experimentation time again.